Yellow Bird Puts SEK 106m Millennium Project In Production

The Swedish production house Yellow Bird is going to bring to the silver screen Stieg Larsson's best-selling trilogy Millennium for an estimated SEK 106m. Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace are in the lead for first film 'Men Who Hate Women' with Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev (photo left to right) directing.

No better company than Yellow Bird could have taken on board the ambitious project of making a film and 2 TV versions of Stieg Larsson's crime trilogy "Men Who Hate Women", "The Girl Who Plays with Fire" and "The Air Castle that Blew Up". The company - owned since February 2007 by Zodiak TV - has already brought to the screen the adventures of Inspector Wallander, based on Henning Mankell's books as well as crime investigator Irene Huss, created by novelist Helen Tursten.

"Our focus at Yellow Bird is on high quality crime films and TV series based on well-written books, not only police investigations, but crime stories in general. We want to explore all the different aspects of the crime genre," said Søren Stærmose, producer and development executive at Yellow Bird.

In the Millennium screen versions, the Swedish star actor Michael Nykvist will play the inspector Mikael Blomkvist and the up-and-coming Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (Daisy Diamond) IT hacker Lisbeth Salander. Behind the camera is the experienced Danish filmmaker Arden Oplev (We Shall Overcome). "It was important for us to pick the right person who would take care of the genre and know how to handle the tough themes explored by Stieg Larsson who was a fighter of freedom of expression and who hated men who hated women," continues Stærmose.

"The Millennium trilogy is really about the oppression of women - within the family in the first book, within the trafficking milieu in the second book and within the political spheres in the third book. In his film We Shall Overcome, Arden Oplev also describes a fight, the one of a little boy against the system in the 1960s in Denmark. Arden Oplev has also directed several very successful TV series (including the 2005 Emmy award-winning The Eagle and Rejseholdet/Unit 1) so he knows how to direct crime series."

Arden Oplev will direct Men Who Hate Women which will start filming in spring 2008 for a spring 2009 theatrical release in Scandinavia. Screenwriters Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel who collaborated on Arcel's own feature film The Island of Lost Souls will work on the two first Stieg Larsson book adaptations and Ulf Ryberg on the third one. Men Who Hate Women is slated for theatrical release with The Girl Who Plays with Fire and The Air Castle that Blew Up intended for DVD releases and broadcast on SVT.

The Yellow Bird production is co-produced by Nordisk Film (which holds Scandinavian distribution rights), and by Swedish, Danish and German broadcasters SVT, DR, and ZDF respectively.

Stærmose said the total financing is not finalised yet and Yellow Bird hopes to bring on board regional and national film institutes from Scandinavia as well as Nordisk Film & TV Fond. No sales agent has been appointed yet.